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When Aaron Krywiak took a job with the city's drainage department, he never imagined he'd be digging up 70 million-year-old dinosaur remains.

But that's what he and work partner Ryley Paul unearthed earlier this month, when they were jack-hammering out a sewer tunnel nine storeys below the ground in west Edmonton.

"We were just digging, doing our jobs, and we found some rocks a couple of weeks ago and we just figured they were interesting looking rocks," Krywiak, 21, said Monday.

"A little further down the road we found a couple of teeth and that's when we realized those other rocks were something else."

Police were called to make sure they weren't human bones, officials said.

Later a paleontologist from the University of Alberta was called to the excavation site, on Quesnell Crescent, east of 149 Street at 76 Avenue, in the Quesnell Heights neighbourhood.

He concluded a well-preserved tooth belonged to the Albertosaurus, a relative of the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex. Other remains likely belonged to the hadrosaur Edmontosaurus, said officials.

Paul said he's talked to co-workers who have been digging deep under Edmonton for decades, and have never come across such a find.

"The whole experience has been pretty exciting, mostly because you don't get to hold that many years of history in your hand," said Paul, 24. "After that we've been keeping a close eye on everything we find now."

Donald Brinkman, director of preservation and research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, said this is the first instance he can recall in Alberta where sewer work has unearthed dinosaur remains.

"It's never happened," said Brinkman, adding, however, that discoveries have been made previously in mines.

"In terms of digging tunnels, I don't know of any other instance. That's very rare."

Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta, said it's not unusual to find dinosaur remains in Edmonton, particularly in the river valley.

He said the university is excavating another "bone bed" where similar fossils have been found in the Blackmud Creek area on the southside.

Caldwell said researchers want to find out if there's any connection between the two sites.

"If they are the same age, then we've got a very large area that was covered with dead dinosaurs and their bits and pieces," he said.

Caldwell speculated similar remains may be deep under the ground all over the city, but will likely never be discovered.

Yin Hsung, acting general supervisor of tunneling for the city, said the discovery will not slow down construction of the 1.2 km sewer line, which he described as being part of Edmonton's flood prevention infrastructure. Hsung said a paleontologist will be on hand as the digging continues.